Mental Tai Chi and dissolving the remove

Yesterday I had one of those pleasing experiences where I got the same message from three different sources -- one inside my head, from me, and the other two from outside, a guided meditation and a book I was reading. 

First, me. I was idly going to sleep, not thinking about much of anything in particular, when the notion mental Tai Chi popped into my mind. 

For seventeen years I've been practicing Tai Chi under the guidance of a skilled instructor who is adept at teaching the martial aspect of Tai Chi, as well as the more typical relaxation/exercise aspect. 

One of the keys to Tai Chi, an internal martial art (in contrast to an external marital art like karate), is not meeting force with force. Instead, when it comes to dealing with some sort of attack, the idea is encapsulated in ABC.

Accept. Blend. Control. There's other words to describe these concepts. I just like the ABC'ness of these.

Say someone tries to punch you. Though this takes practice, the goal is to guide the punch away from you with minimal force. You accept the punch without letting it hit you, such as by gently diverting the punch past your head -- maybe with your hand/arm, or just by turning your body.

In doing this, you're blending with the attacker's movement, using their energy to redirect the movement into a more productive direction than you getting hit in the head.

Then control probably might be called for. This gets into defensive joint locks and other aspects of the martial side of Tai Chi that resemble controlling moves in other styles like judo, jujitsu, and such. The aim isn't to injure the other person, but to stop them from attacking you.

It struck me that mental Tai Chi is similar.

Except the "attacker" is words spoken by someone else, or perhaps our own mind. Instead of forcefully resisting what feels like a threat, we do our best to to accept the words and let them slide by, blending with them rather than trying to push them away or respond with our own attacking speech.

This is an ideal, of course.

I don't claim to be adept at doing this. I often react to an insult or accusation as a threat, rather than doing the mental Tai Chi thing. Meaning, I jump right to trying to control the other person, or my own mind, rather than first accepting and blending.

That morning I listened to a guided meditation by Jeff Warren on my iPhone's Calm app. It was called Dissolve the Remove. Here's a partial transcript.

The meditation teacher Susan Tiver has a nice phrase. She says meditation is often described as observing something, like the breath, as though we were operating from a distance, from a remove.

But meditation, she says, is also about dissolving the remove, about collapsing distance. Getting really close to our experience, really feeling what's here. I love this duality. That sometimes we want space around our experience. That's legit. 

And sometimes we want to collapse that space. We want to become more intimate with everything that's going on, more intimate with exactly how this moment is feeling, I'm right inside it. 

...There sometimes can be a sense that we're up here looking, and the sensation is down there, it's down in the body. Or maybe it's a sound that's out there in the world. Let's see if we can dissolve that remove a little bit. 

Come on down from the observing head, and climb into the body. So this is about feeling. Instead of only observing body sensations from a distance, see if you can feel what's here from the inside.

...When we truly dissolve the remove, what's left? Just one thing. A single experience of self and world, a single continuum of feeling and sensing that kind of blurs the boundary between inside and out. Intimate with everything.

In the morning I also read some pages in Happiness and How It Happens by The Happy Buddha (Suryacitta Malcolm Smith). Here's a passage I liked.

So how do we let go?

As an example, let's look at how we relax and let go when we meditate. When we sit, we tune into the felt experience of the body. As we do this, we sense how the body is. We may see that we're a little agitated, maybe a little tense.

We feel how we are and we accept how we are.

We don't try to relax but let everything be simply as it is. We let go trying to be different from how we are, which leads to greater relaxation. This is the essence of meditation, nothing special at all.

Within the felt experience of the body, we let whatever comes into awareness simply be and move on. Our work isn't to interfere or to try to change it, but to observe it and let go and relax. 

Comments

[Spence Tepper]

Accept. Blend. Control.?
Or...
A. Accept your Fate...
B. Embrace your Faith...?

Faith includes faith in the power of the entire physical creation and its higher intelligence and greater power than your own tiny one dimensional point of consciousness.

We find conflict at every turn thinking as a single one dimensional point. Our tiny grain of sand brain floating in the dark is always butting up against the others, There is no end of conflict to resolve that way.

Expand that point of awareness and become one with the whole system.

Then there is no end to peace, joy and zero conflict to resolve.

Accept your fate. Embrace your Faith.

[Spence Tepper]

When we do not actually exist except as an illusion of the brain, a created persona, there can be no real intimacy.

When we rise into a higher experience, our prior experience dissolves naturally, and intimacy and expanse become two illusions that are simply two tiny perspectives of experience.

Move there, go there, and everything else changes naturally. The scenary is constantly dissolving into news scenary when you are driving towards your true and natural destination.

You are always shadowboxing with yourself, but you don't actually exist. You are on a journey.

That is the truth of Tai Chi.

[Albert]

Spencer! I exist and so do you, my brother. I am aware and so are you.

What is happening? The body, mind, senses and environment are a sophisticated prison - and consciousness is the prisoner. One mistakenly glorifies and prides themselves on their temporary self, adulating their body and mind and all sensations. These are identified with as the true self and considered very real....

But what is forgotten or neglected is the fact that all four - body, mind, senses and the world - will disappear at death. So how can these be "real" or "substantive" or the be-all of existence?

The great magic show of life is intended to bamboozle and hypnotize us. We neglect what is most important about human existence - the conscious entity within that is a prisoner of its accumulated karmas.

[Dungeness]

@ Albert [ The body, mind, senses and environment are a sophisticated prison - and consciousness is the prisoner. ]

I can't resist throwing a peanut from the gallery. Mystics
say consciousness also provides a get-outta-jail card.
Turn the attention inward and you can escape the
clutches of prison walls. Even the most sophisticated
prison can't hold you.

[Tim Rimmer]

‘When we truly dissolve the remove, what's left? Just one thing. A single experience of self and world, a single continuum of feeling and sensing that kind of blurs the boundary between inside and out. Intimate with everything’.

This is cool and reminds me of a YouTube clip from Adyashanti that I’ve mentioned before - ‘Allowing everything to be as it is’, when he talks about a friend’s experience of intimacy with everything as a result (4.44 mins in). It’s a bit Tai Chiiy at the start and well worth a look imo.

To me the Tiver quote speaks not only to the normalness of both the process and state of meditation, but also something infinitely scaleable. From just ‘sitting’, to expanded states of non-separation - essentially that of which the mystics speak. I find it hard to believe that such states are solely the domain of electrochemical processes within the human brain.

Hope everyone is doing ok

[Tendzin]

Interesting topic. For a good part of my early life I used a "strategy of passivity" when insulted. The reason for why I did this are complex, some of them tied to fear, others to a spiritual ideal. I no longer think passivity is a good strategy for dealing with people.

Boundaries do matter. If I'm passive to someone who is out of line, I'm co-signing his arrogance, which may lead him to continue his bad behavior with other people. It's something similar to if I were a law maker and set new laws that allowed for stealing. However well intentioned my motives, I'm not really helping anyone with such a strategy of passive tolerance.

The difficulty for me is discerning when someone is truly out of line, or whether they have a valid criticism. In the moment, it's sometimes hard to confidently know which is which. And to tag this to the martial arts/ self defense analogy, in my experience most self defense encounters are quite unlike what we see in the movie. They tend to materialize in very unexpected and strange circumstances. Mindfulness and preparation are essential; this world is really still a jungle.

[Ron E.]

@”We let go trying to be different from how we are, which leads to greater relaxation. This is the essence of meditation, nothing special at all.”

'Nothing special at all'. I agree with this statement. I feel that all the searching and chasing after gurus and the like – along with the desire for some sort of supernatural experiences – underlies much of the 'seeker's' problems.

It seems that desire is at the route of the problem. Not the simple desire for good food, warm clothes and a safe home to live in, and even the desire to inquire and discover which are life's natural needs, but the more complex needs of the various mind created states that occupy much of our thinking and which is constantly channeled toward protecting the construct of 'me', the 'self'.

The mind, the brains' repository of mental experiences; that is memory, feelings, emotions, thinking – and most importantly with humans – the sense of being 'me'. It is this 'I', this 'me' or 'self' that demands to survive and even to live on beyond death. The ego mind also has a tendency to assume that every mysterious experience emanating from within the brain is a verification that we are something more than just a natural physical entity.

[Spence Tepper]

Hi Albert
"If you try to find the path within yourself, then it is the same path which every seeker has to follow. If you try to find the Lord outside, then naturally you will just have an illusion of a path according to your own mental concept."
MCS Spiritual Perspectives vol 1, p. 293

Very straightforward.

The way to finding who we really are is within. Yes, we must see the illusions there also. But because we can separate within from our mental thinking, our bodily sensations and all those desires that manipulate and enslave our thinking, there is the hope and the reality of the path to self-realization.

Once we have that, then there is the hope and the joy of realizing something else, the realization of something greater than ourselves.

Who is doing the observing then we are beyond our thinking?

[Spence Tepper]

Note also that if we are constructed alike, the path must be the same construction within. It cannot be a new path at all.

However, the methods of controlling the mind so we can enjoy that Truth, can be modified for the cultural conditioning of our minds in this time.

[Dungeness]

@ Ron E. [ The ego mind also has a tendency to assume that every mysterious experience emanating from within the brain is a verification that we are something more than just a natural physical entity. ]

The problem is that it's also the same mind telling you
that "ego mind" is the source of mis-assumptions. That
"judgmental mind" may be the true villain in this drama
and simply deflecting blame to gain your trust. To suss
it out mystics say you'll to go within and catch the real
culprit in the act.

[Albert]

Yo Spencer. Thanks kindly for bringing in some wisdom from MCS.

You write, "Who is doing the observing (when) we are beyond our thinking?" Well, that's the question of the ages, my good man! Who has true objectivity in this world?

I am reminded of the great physicist, Arthur Eddington - quote: "Something unknown is doing we don't know what."

Something to think about! Please pardon the unintentional pun.

[Spence Tepper]

‘When we truly dissolve the remove, what's left? Just one thing. A single experience of self and world, a single continuum of feeling and sensing that kind of blurs the boundary between inside and out. Intimate with everything’.

This gets to about 80% of it but just short of the mark.

When your consciousness is even slightly separated from thinking it is no longer a single point. The mind may have achieved one pointed focus, but the awareness is expanded. At that point there is awareness but not an identifiable point. It isn't s blur. It's clarity. It isn't omniscient, just aware of multiple things. You could say that you are seeing things as they are, at least in your general vacinity.

Imagine the files on your computer. They each contain information. But as far as your physical hard drive, they are all points of data on the same list. They are only separated by different labels.

Different people, different times, different opinions, even different experiences are simply data. We experience points under the labeling of me and mine or you and yours or they and theirs.

But when consciousness separates from mind these are all discrete qualities, each a single record in the same database, separated into different sections but all part of the same one.

So instead of being aware of a handful of points, you become aware of a whole page of data at a single glance.

At some point in deep meditation you can scroll through it in as much detail as you like. But the downside of that is that, not being at Master's level, none of it is retained when we re - engage the mind drive. Then we just have what is in mind and only the vague impression of our moments beyond mind.

[Ron E.]

Dungeness. Then you have to rely on the brain/body to experience directly ‘what is’. That’s all that’s required, no interpretation, no desire to capture and interfere with ‘what is’. It is simply seeing before the mind arrives with all its opinions, knowledge and store of information.

Which is what I see that Suryacitta Malcolm Smith is getting at (at the end of Brian's blog) :- "Within the felt experience of the body, we let whatever comes into awareness simply be and move on. Our work isn't to interfere or to try to change it, but to observe it and let go and relax."

[Dungeness]

@ Ron E. [ Then you have to rely on the brain/body to experience directly ‘what is’. That’s all that’s required, no interpretation, no desire to capture and interfere with ‘what is’. It is simply seeing before the mind arrives with all its opinions, knowledge and store of information. ]

Unfortunately, there's no beating the mind to the draw. Every sensation
is registered and the mind filters, files, and/or comments on 'what is'
before you delusionally convince yourself otherwise. The mind often
does this silently and in background channels that require a rigorous
course of mindfulness to 'hear'. Mindfulness is the right path but IMO
will require more a few simple affirmations to free consciousness from
the quickness and iron grip of the mind. The aim of "relaxation tapes"
is laudable but you're still trapped.